Big-Brained Apes Demonstrate Evolution?

Scientists from North Carolina’s Duke University claim to have demonstrated, for the first time, “an evolutionary connection between available food supplies and brain size.” (Many evolutionists believe hominid brain capacity expanded when bipedal hominids began to eat better.) The ScienceDaily article explains:

Members of the orang species inhabiting Sumatra, called Pongo abelii, live in the island’s most favored environment, where soils are best for growing the fruits they most like to eat. “They’ll eat fruits as often as they can, and they’ll travel farther away for them if not nearby,” Taylor said.

Sumatra also appears to be less subject to periodic “El Niño” climatic fluctuations that disrupt vegetative growth on other islands in the Indonesian region, the researchers’ report said.

The scientists found that the nutritionally well-off Sumatran orangutans differed most strikingly from Pongo pygmaeus morio, one of the three subspecies occupying the island of Borneo. The morio subspecies lives in the northeastern part of the island where soils are poorer, access to fruit is most iffy and the impact of El Niño events can be significant.

Dr. Taylor and her colleagues are quick to explain how natural selection explains this diet / brain size correlation.

But does this finding give us an idea of “the conditions steering cognitive evolution,” or is it “vital for understanding what happened during human evolution,” as study coauthor Andrea Taylor suggests? Not exactly. The “problem” (for those who would use this as evidence for evolution) is that Dr. Taylor and her colleagues are quick to explain how natural selection explains this diet / brain size correlation—but natural selection is a creationist concept, described before Darwin! Natural selection is important in understanding how rapid speciation occurs. This is undoubtedly the origin of these two species of orangutan, which would have diverged from one another sometime after the Flood. Evolutionists have yet to discover any information-containing mutations that would actually support the idea of molecules-to-man evolution.

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